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How much did the Apollo program cost?
The U.S spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo ($309 billion when adjusted for inflation). This dataset provides annual expenditures and additional cost…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 701 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
242
Days of Rage
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
243
P.S.: The Best of Intentions
Operations in Lisp, Scheme, and other dynamically-typed languages typically dispatch on representational type information rather than intentional type information. Several broad classes of bugs and confusions can be traced to improper attempts to recover intentional type information from representation types.
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Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…
245
Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
246
Project GREAT: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test
In September 2005 the kids and I took several very accurate cesium atomic clocks from home and parked 5400 feet up Mt Rainier (the volcano near Seattle) for a full two days. The goal was to see if the clocks actually gained time, even if billionths of a second, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity…
247
Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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DWIM
1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.
249
Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux
It’s an exciting time in the Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast community – that was a joke, there is no enthusiast community, it’s just me! 😆
250
NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…
251
RePalm
Dmitry.GR: PalmOS on new hardware!
252
Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
253
A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man
In 1986, at the very first Burn, a crowd of complete strangers gathered around the Man once it was lit it on fire. Nobody had invited them. They didn’t know anything about the 10 Principles, or understand what The Man was...
254
StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames
StarCraft was once mocked as 'Orcs in space' and heading for disaster. This is the story of the reboot that saved it.
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Shuffleboard at McMurdo
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
257
Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
258
UTC, Tai, and Unix Time (2001)
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
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The curious history of NovaMin toothpaste (2018)
I buy my toothpaste from overseas through eBay. Wonder why?
261
A Proposal For the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on A.I. (1955)
A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
262
Bit gold (2005)
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
263
Assembly Routine for Realtime Decoding of Floppy Data
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
264
Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier
In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.
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Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
267
Fuck the Cloud (2009)
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
268
Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
269
Aaron Swartz's Thoughts on djb (2009)
I think it’s time to remind people that D. J. Bernstein is the greatest programmer in the history of the world.
270
I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?